MITC Course Management Meeting

Folks,

This is to let you know the specific plans for our meeting on course management systems/learning management systems on Monday, March 24, 2003. It will be held from 2 PM to 5 PM Central Daylight time at the Intercontinental Hotel, 505 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL (near the southern end of the Magnificent Mile). If you are driving and would like directions, go to http://chicago.illinois.intercontinental.com/directions.shtml, choose "Click here for an interactive area map and custom driving directions to this hotel" at the right side of the page, and fill in your starting location to receive a customized set of directions. We will be meeting in the Wright Room, which is located on the eighth floor in the South Tower. Refreshments and coffee will be available there.

The agenda has three major items:

Discussion of the results of surveys of IT directors and faculty members at ACM and GLCA colleges on the use of course management systems at their institutions conducted earlier this winter. Information on the surveys and compilations of the results are at http://www.midwest-itc.org/Share/CMS.html.

Initial planning for a conference on course management systems/learning management systems for technologists, faculty members, and librarians to be proposed for MITC funding. We hope that a planning group will be formed to continue this planning process.

Discussion of implementing an open-source OKI-compatible learning management system at one or more ACM or GLCA colleges on a pilot basis. The University of Michigan is interested in collaborating with MITC and one or more ACM and/or GLCA colleges on a pilot of the CHEF tools now being developed at the University. Information on the CHEF project is available at http://www.chefproject.org. Joseph Hardin, who is the project's leader, will attend our meeting. Scott Siddall, who has been collaborating with Stanford University on a pilot implementation of Stanford's OKI-compatible system CourseWork at Denison University, will also attend and will share Denison's experience to date in a pilot of this kind. Manuel Rendon, MITC technology specialist, recently attended a CHEF developers' workshop and will be able to comment from that perspective.

Following our meeting, MITC will host an early dinner for anyone who wishes to continue the conversation.

We expect participation in this meeting by the following individuals:
Joel Clemmer, Macalester College
Roberta Lembke, Saint Olaf College
Jim Cubit, Lake Forest College
Tom Kirk, Earlham College
Joel Cooper, Carleton College
Linda Ward, Arno Damerow, and John Bell, Beloit College
Lisa Sisley-Blinn, Kalamazoo College
Scott Siddall, Denison University
Joesph Hardin, the University of Michigan
Nancy Millichap, Alex Wirth-Cauchon, and Manuel Rendon, MITC

If there is any change in your plans between now and Monday, please let me know.

Nancy

--

Nancy Millichap
Director of MITC, the Midwest Instructional Technology Center
Associated Colleges of the Midwest/Great Lakes Colleges Association
535 West William, Suite 302
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
Telephone (office): 734-913-0443
Telephone (mobile): 734-846-2242
Fax: 734-761-3939
Email: millichap@midwest-itc.org
http://www.midwest-itc.org
My response:

Thoughts on Course Management Systems

Response to Summary of IT Directors’ Survey of Course Management Systems Utilization.

1. Compared to some other technologies, such as email, CMS systems have had a slow uptake at small colleges.
2. Usage by faculty varies wildly; either lots of faculty are using CMS with more than a single course account each (40%) - enthusiastic - or few faculty use it with just one course (60%) - indifferent.
   
   Question i: What is the underlying reason for this difference?
   
3. Looking at the disciplines represented and assuming that the campuses listed in the course account question are in the same order as those listed in the disciplines question (a table would have been useful here) we can see that there seems to be no association between faculty "enthusiasm" and subject discipline. An important point.
   
   

   Campus #	Course Accounts	Unique Faculty	Courses / Faculty	Disciplines	Systems Admin support	User Training support
   1	150	64	2.3	Biology, Nursing, Rhetoric, Languages, Reserved Reading	1	1.5
   2	85	70	1.2	Psychology, Biology, Communications, History	0.1	0.2
   3	53	40	1.3	Chemistry, Biology, Tutorials, English, Sociology	1	1
   4	13	11	1.2	Women and Gender Studies, Political Science, Sociology, English	0.1	0.05
   5	200	100	2	Politics, English, First Year Seminars, History, Music Theory	0.17	0.09
   6	8	5	1.6	Economics, History, Norwegian, Art	0.25	0.5
   7	172	73	2.4	English, Political Science, Biology, Mathematics & Computer Science, Psychology	0.1	0.25

   
   Question ii: What was the average class size of classes using CMS? My hunch would be that CMS scales very well with class size and would provide more gains for faculty with large classes.
   
4. CMS component use.
   Basically, it seems that making course materials available on-line is the primary use, with discussion board as well. With all other components (Calendar, on-line quiz, chat room) occasional use exceeded regular use. This means that these components are probably not a vital part of the courses offered.
   
5. Support.
   One might expect that where CMS has been taken up readily (the 'enthusiastic' campuses) there would be a greater level of support. The figures don't seem to show this. So why might this be so? Could it be that "enthusiasm" for CMS is related more to the general level of technical ability and enthusiasm among faculty than to direct support. After all, uploading files to CMS is no more conceptually difficult than attaching a file to an email message.
   
   Question iii: Is the Institutional investment in support and training commensurate with the investment that teaching faculty are asked to make in order to integrate their courses with CMS?
   
6. Change of strategy.
   It is quite remarkable that 40% of CMS campuses (3 of 7) were considering a change of CMS strategy given the investment that must have already been made. It's probable that these campuses were the 'indifferent' ones referred to above. The reasons given seem to imply that the integrated functionality of a CMS, the level of sophistication and ease of use, and especially the cost, is insufficiently compelling to replace existing stand-alone applications.
   
   Question iv: If we can equate 'indifference' with 'lack of success' then the success rate of CMS is rather low, and the risks of implementation (especially given the cost of commercial systems) rather high. What other factors could have contributed to the lack of success of CMS on those campuses? Could these other factors mitigate against any CMS implementation? Are these factors prevalent on my campus where we don't have CMS yet?

---

Response to Faculty Members’ Use of Course Management Systems (CMS): Results of a Survey

1. Components of CMS utilized.
   It's interesting to compare these responses to the perceptions of the I.T Directors. In contrast to the Director's answer to the same question (#4 above) the faculty response was that for all CMS components barring Chat rooms (course materials, calendars, quizzes, discussion boards) numbers using frequently outweighed numbers using occasionally.
   
2. Faculty Use of CMS.
   Here again, the picture seems different to the Director's report. A massive 84% of respondents agreed that CMS was worth their time and effort, the same proportion agreed that they would use it in other courses, and the same percentage said that their students liked the system. However, only two thirds said that student learning had improved, and a miserly 30% said that CMS reduced their workload (which implies that for 70% of faculty CMS did not reduce their workload). However, three quarters said that the benefits of CMS were well worth the time taken to learn the system.
   
   Of the factors that would influence faculty to expand their use of CMS, "more time" was rated most important followed by evidence that CMS positively affected student learning. Support issues were also important.
   
   Finally, CMS issues that faculty wanted to work with related strongly to pedagogy. This is encouraging since faculty look beyond the gee-wizz clothing of CMS to real pedagogical value.

---

Discussion of implementing an open-source OKI-compatible learning management system

I think that Earlham would be interested in doing this. I can think of two faculty, Monteze Snyder and Randall Shrock, who seemed to be sufficiently interested. Maybe also Aletha Stahl. I think we have the capability to host an Open Source system such as CHEF at Earlham (at least, that's what Rowan has given me to understand). So I think that the issue is less Blackboard vs WebCT but more, how do the different Open Source systems stack up against each other. For example, CHEF, Carnegie Mellon, Associated Colleges of the South, etc.

Meeting with Tom Kirk

Short meeting (15mins) in which I talked about my thoughts on CHEF.
Tom said that I sould clarify the offer of U.M to hsot a couple of earlham course, and also clarify that CHEF was open source and could be installed at E.C.

After the BSU meeting we're going to get together to discuss integration issues with portal and content management.

Tom thinks that we should have a course that could use CHEF (or similar) by Fall and one for the Ploughshares program for nect Spring of 2004 to go to all three campuses. He suggested Cheryl Gibbs' Peace Journalism and Steve Gibbs Pacifism courses.

B.S.U Conference for April 5th

Cheryl Gibbs
Caroline Higgins
Carol Hunter
Mic Jackson
Tom Kirk
Randy Kouns
Rajaram Krishnan
David Leeper
Wes Miller
Mark Pearson
Lucy Price
Chris Swafford-Smith
Tom Steffes
Mickey White
Steve Wilson

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to confirm that arrangements have been made for our visit to BSU to see a demonstration of video conferencing equipment and discussions with faculty and instructional technology support people at BSU. The day (Saturday, April 5) looks to be exciting. Here is the plan.

If you want to make your way to BSU I will send you directions and parking directions. Otherwise transportation will be provided. We will meet at Security in order to leave about 8:45.

The seminar has three components:
1. Morning, 10 a.m. to noon. Pedagogy, faculty concerns, logistics, other issues.
2. Noon to 1:30 p.m. Working conversation lunch near campus among all participants.
3. 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Technical issues, equipment, demonstration, practice.

BSU faculty and IT staff (listed below) will lead the discussion but you should arm yourself with questions that you want answered. The lunch will be in a local restaurant within walking distance of the campus and the emphasis will be on the opportunity to engage in conversation with counter parts both at Manchester and Goshen as well as BSU.

I need a definite commitment from you by Monday March 31 and an indication whether you will drive yourself or want transportation provided so I can make final arrangements. The college transportation will return directly to Richmond when the seminar is over.

Tom Kirk

_________
BSU faculty involved in the seminar. This group is enthusiastic about our visit and look forward to sharing their experience with distance education. The entire group is very experienced in this activity.

Jay Thompson, faculty, Educational Studies
Kay Hodson, faculty, School of Nursing
Inga Hill, College of Business administrator
Fred Nay, Director of University Computing Services
Charles Jones, Director, Office of Teaching and Learning Advancement, Center for
Teaching Technology
John Dalton, Manager of Video Information Services (Library)
Mike Dalton, Distance Education Media Manager
Jon Weiss, Microlan Systems University Computing Services
Dan Lutz, Teleplex Administrator
Arthur W. Hafner, Dean, University Libraries

Addendum:
Dear Colleagues,

Mic Jackson asked me a question that made me realize I hadn't communicated clearly about the April 5 session. This seminar on distance education is sponsored by Plowshare and faculty, librarians and IT people from Goshen and Manchester will also be attending. In fact one of my agenda items for this day is to get faculty from the three campuses communicating. I don't expect that there are going to be as many from the other institutions but at least enough that we can begin to make connections. I expect that this will lead to further discussions and more intense communication among the three campuses about peace studies curricula and how courses proposed to e taught on one campus will fit with the courses taught on the other two.

For the 5th the major focus is on exploring the issues in distance education and beginning to answer the questions about the pedagogical issues and why residential colleges might be interested in distance education.

Tom Kirk

CPR Proposal - meat & veg

The proposal for a CPC sponsored CPR workshop in June.

Background to Calibrated Peer Review.

This is still in the editing process.

CPR proposal for CPC

Jennifer Ziebarth sent this email to the faculty list today:

From: Jennifer Ziebarth
To: faculty@earlham.edu
Subject: [Faculty] Peer Review writing tool -- workshop proposal
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 15:07:40 -0500

Friends,

We are getting ready to put forth a proposal to CPC for a General Education workshop focused on a tool we think can be a very useful part of integrating writing into courses across the curriculum. It may be of particular interest to those whose courses are including more writing than they have in the past.

CPR (Calibrated Peer Review) is a web-based tool designed by chemists at UCLA, with funding from the NSF and HHMI. It's grounded in good educational and writing theory. It allows students to review their peers' writing, assisted by guiding questions and "calibrated" by samples provided by the instructor.

CPR is a part of the regular summer workshop series offered by the NSF through the Chautauqua program, and Janet has attended such a workshop. At Earlham, Janet has used it successfully in Chemistry in Societal Context, and Jennifer is preparing to use it in Elementary Statistics.

More information about CPR can be found at their web page:
http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu .

If you would like more information about being part of the proposal we send to CPC, please drop any of us a line. We envision a week-long workshop, spent partly learning how to use CPR and partly devising and discussing our own CPR assignments.

Mark Pearson
Janet Russell
Jennifer Ziebarth

7 Deadly sins

This is from the "Heal Your Church" Blog (kinda intriuging).

The seven deadly sins are those of web site design in general and so this is rather interesting for management class stuff, eh what?

Saving Images from Acrobat Recently I was sent a couple of screenshots via email. To my surprise they turned up as Acrobat PDF files - this perhaps shouldn't have been such a surprise since I knew that the sender (Hanna Reeves from U.M) used a Mac Powerbook G4 with OS X.2. OS X has the cool feature of allowing anything to be printed to pdf, so presumably she had just captured the screen and printed to pdf. However, when I uploaded the files it into my Blog space using the Upload feature of MoveableType they did not start up with acrobat upon clicking. Rather than faff around trying to get Acrobat to start up I wondered whether it would be possible to export the images from the PDF files. And indeed it was.

1. Load file with Acrobat
2. select File -> Export -> Extract Images As -> JPEG Files | PNG Files
3. At this point you save the graphic image(s). Click on the Settings button to change some settings.

What format should I choose? JPEG or PNG? Initially I decided upon PNG. Here's what happened:

1. Image saved with default settings. Gosh it's huge - 1303x804 pixels!
2. Image saved with 96 dpi. Still icky
3. Image saved at 72 dpi. That looks good.
4. Just to compare I saved the same image as JPEG, medium resolution, 72 dpi. Notice how utterly bad the text is. And there is very little difference in file size compared to the PNG version (203Kb JPG, 225 Kb PNG).

So, my recommendation is to save screenshots from Acrobat PDF files in PNG format at 72dpi.

Initial idea for CPC Proposal re CHEF

Sent to Wes Miller, Tom Steffes with CC: to Rowan Littel at 4:02pm:

I got this reply today from Hannah Reeves in the Learning Technology Center in the Media Union at University Michigan. (Joseph Hardin gave an excellent presentation about CHEF to the MITC conference in February.

From the message it looks like we could use the CHEF system on a pilot basis with a course or two in the Fall. I am keen to work with one or two faculty in doing this - I would volunteer my own course, management 110, but I am already planning to use Blog and CPR.

Could we make use of CPC General Education funds to stage a two/three day workshop where faculty could learn to use the CHEF system and figure how they would use it in a Gen Ed class in the Fall? Then we could propose a MITC sponsored workshop at Earlham over the Christmas break that looked at Open Source and commercial Course Management Systems and the experience of faculty users and tech support. I would certainly be prepared to make a proposal to CPC.

Mark

Exciting News from U.M

Got this email from Hannah Reeves:

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 10:52:00 -0500
From: Hannah Reeves
Sender: hannabel@critters.imap.itd.umich.edu
To: Mark Pearson
Subject: Re: Access to CourseTools Next Generation
X-Mailer: Mulberry/2.2.1 (Mac OS X)

Mark,

Apologies for the lengthy delay in responding to this message. We've been trying to set up a workshop and a conference at the same time.

The CHEF group would be very interested in talking to you about the possibility of Earlham using CTNG in the fall! I have set up a meeting with John Leasia, Project Manager and Joseph Hardin, the CHEF director, to discuss this on Wednesday. Any information you could send in the meantime vis-a-vis potential numbers (of students/classes) would be helpful.

Attached are two screen shots, screen 1 and screen 2, from the Spanish site. Just wanted to clarify one thing here. The Argentinian news we have on this site is displayed through an embedded iFrame window. If we have access to an RSS feed, we can create a separate portlet and plug it into the framework so that it shows up as a menu item. In this case, we are merely linking CTNG to the Clarin Diario site through the iFrame tool. The nice part of this, as I mentioned to you earlier, is that this instructor writes every few weeks to request a new link be set up to Chilean news or something relevant to what the class is studying at that point. Hope this makes some sense. I'd be happy to send screen shots of the back-end (the customization of panes, portlets and java applets) later and will follow up after our meeting tomorrow.

Best,
Hannah

--On Thursday, March 6, 2003 10:13 AM -0500 Mark Pearson wrote:

At 09:37 AM 3/4/2003 -0500, you wrote:
> Let us know what you think.

Well, several faculty werre quite excited and of course want to play with
it. I said "hands off - it's my toy!" (not really :-)
However, what I'd like to do in the next couple of months is to work out
a possible way that half a dozen Earlham faculty (at most) could use Chef
to Manage a course each starting in the Fall. Whether that means hosting
at Michigan or Earlham I don't know but if we start soon we can suss
things out in a leisurely fashion.

The screen shot is of a blank screen that I obtained from CHEF at one
point. I have tried to replicate this phenomenon but have failed. I use
Netscape 7 because it has the cool tabbed panes which I like and anything
else I discover I'll pass along.

Also, you showed me a cool Spanish Chef course with a Spanish newspaper
RSS feed. Any chance of a screen shot of that because our language folks
would be well chuffed with seeing that one.

Cheers

Mark

More on COURSE management

Wes Miller sent me this link to the Associated College's of the South (ACS) Course Delivery System. The link "Why a Course Delivery System" is interesting, as well as the fact that all the documents are html and there is a built-in MS Word to HTML translator. Hmmm.
The "Information about future releases and tentatively planned features" link is also interesting. Get a load of :

Planned Release
Version 2
In use at cds.colleges.org: August 2003
Tentative code release: August 2003
Planned Features:
(This is a subset; the full list is available in the Requirements Specifications. Contact bonefas@colleges.org for more information.)

• Exam Builder
• Lecture Builder
• Media Libaray for maintaining user-specific repository of media items (images, video, etc)
• Calendar and enhanced support for user updates on upcoming course events
• multi-channel chat
• GroupSpace for collaborative project building
• enhanced user-profiles and course-specific profiles
• support (plug-in) for different streaming media systems
• context-sensitive help system
• modular design for course features, enabling course managers to select from available functionality
  

Will find out more, but all of the above look rather exciting, what?

Content Management Systems and Earlham

To start off the discussion I have culled some conversation from a mailing list called cms-list at http://www.cms-list.org

The first thread I looked at was on the topic of "when is a CMS needed". The discussion started off with some rules of thumb for larger websites but ended up with "My rule of thumb is: if you have a website, you need a CMS." !! I must say that I agreed with the poster of this message.

A short conversation about CMS features with an interesting side topic on content relationship management.

Here's an excellently useful conversation started by the Web Coordinator at Grinnell (I think) - CMS for Higher Education. Has some incredibly useful links to Bristol University in the UK. The relationship between portals and CMS - an incredibly useful diagram.

Here's an interesting link: Companies Overpaying For Content Management Technology, Reports Jupiter Research

And take a coup d'oeul at this fabulously relevant and content rich site : http://www.cmswatch.com/ especially the "5 biggest mistakers in CMS selection" article. Excellent.

 

System Management and CMS

Conversation with Rowan today:

I asked him what the server implications were of a take-up of UMich's CHEF.
For example, if we encouraged a small number of faculty to employ CHEF for a course in the fall would we want to go with hosting on U Mich itself or a pilot host here at ECS? Rowan pointed out that the environment will be a lot better controlled if it's hosted here and if the faculty are enthusiastic then it'd give a better experience. In terms of authentication ECS is moving to a scheme based on LDAP. They are getting a Sun server specially to run an LDAP service which will provide authentication to every application run on the server (eg M.T, IMAP, Twkiki, etc). This will make implementing CHEF a lot easier apparently.

So, the question is, do we want to encourage faculty to jump on the CHEF bandwagon this fall? Put together a document with Pros and Cons.

For myself, I am planning to use Blog as my main I.T tool for MGMT110 class in the Fall. More on this later.

CPR and new General Education programme

Thought occurred to me in Faculty meeting; why not organise a week long session this coming summer so that faculty (science fac in the first instance) can create their own personalised CPR unit for a Gen Ed course. The objective would be to have one or more CPR questions completed by the end of the week so that they could just present CPR during the course and have it be a low faculty input way to get extra writing into the course.

Initial list of faculty who might be interested:

• Jennifer Zeibarth
  
• Kathy milar
  
• Corinne Diebel
  
• Amy mulnix
  
• Mark Stocksdale
  
  Non-Science folks:
  
  
• Monteze Synder
  
• Jay Roberts
  

I need to put together a rough proposal tomorrow of 1-2 pages:

• What is CPR?
  
• How can it be used:
  
  
  
  • Janet's Street Level Science CHEM 106 course
    
  • Gen Ed courses, new and used
    
  
  
• Comparative writing - sciences, humanities.
  
• Reluctance of students to express themselves in science
  
• Objectives and time need ed to realise them
  
• Schedule for the week
  
• After this. Followup session sponsored by MITC invite humanities faculty from EC and other faculty from MITC colleges to EC campus and have guy from Berekly to intrucdue it.
  

Jennifer Z has hinted that CPC might look kindly upon a mass proposal of this kind. If we get enough interest then I think the ball will roll.

Email from Steve Heiney to faculty 4th March 2003:

Earlham College has set aside a fund to encourage faculty innovation and planning to implement the new general education program. We hope that faculty will take advantage of this opportunity for both personal and institutional growth.

Curricular Policy Committee will distribute these funds in response to proposals from teaching faculty. While this fund is ample, it is possible that we cannot fund every proposal.

• We invite proposals from individuals who wish to develop new courses.

• We invite proposals for collaboration among those developing courses that satisfy new requirements. We especially encourage proposals for the Earlham Seminars, for Interpetive Practices and for Comparative Practices, though we welcome proposals for other of the requirements as well.

• We invite faculty to establish other groups, too, to work toward implementing the new general education program.

• We will fund as many as two proposals from individuals who wish to undertake two different projects.

  These proposals--no more than a page or two in length--are due April 1st. A second imperative is that work be begun by June 30th. We will award a stipend of $1000 for meetings during a week and other or subsequent work and a book allowance of $ 500. In addition, we will provide a stipend of $ 150 per day for those participating in one-day workshops. Proposals should be sent to Steve Heiny (heinyst or Drawer 58).

  
  Steve Heiny for CPC

  Posted by markp at 05:39 PM

Course Management meeting #2

Attendees at this session in LBC

Faculty	Email address	Dept	Interest
Amy Mulnix	amymul	Biology	not much
Brent Smith	brents	Biology	not much
Dan Rosenberg	danr	So/Ann	some
Dusko Koncaliev	koncadu	ECS
Janet Russell	russeja	Sciences	tutor
Jennifer Ziebarth	ziebaje	Maths	good deal
Jon Branstrator	jonb	Earth Sciences	some
Larry Stimpert	stimpla	Biology (temp)	unknown
Lucy Price	pricelu	ECS
Monteze Snyder	snydemo	Management	great amount

Course Management meeting #1 Attendees:

Aletha Stahl	stahlal	Languages	Some interest
Heidi Hemker	hemkehi	Bookshop	general - what's going on?
Randall Shrock	randalls	M.A.T	a good deal of interest applicable too
Rowan Littel	littejo	ECS
Scott Hess	hesssc	English	some interest

MITC Contacts Contacts made at MITC conference at U of M Feb 27th to March 1st

University Michigan Media Union Learning technology Lab

• Michelle Loita
  Usability Specialist beejoo@umich.edu
• Hanna Reeves
  hannabel@umich.edu or ctng-support@umich.edu
  www.chefproject.org
  ctng.ummu.umich.edu

Others

Beloit	Arno Damerow	Instructional technologist	damerowa@beloit.edu		Interested in Chef. Implementing a Portal system created by a "consultant"
Carleton	Carly J Born	ACC for Literature and Foreign Languages	cborn@carleton.edu	Hot Potatoes s/w Languages quiz	Hot Potatoes quiz software used with Langauges. Cooool
Oberlin	Barbara Sawhill	Director & Lang Tech Specialist	Barbara.Sawhill@oberlin.edu
Lawrence	David Berk			Flash Instructional Audio	Flash framework for Instructional Audio. Dead brill. Split up MP3 music piece and annotate sections with XML files.